Airport Planning and El Toro

* Hypocrisy in action! The citizens of Newport Beach overwhelmingly voted in favor of Measure S, requiring significant development issues to go on the ballot. These were the same voters who opposed and continue to legally challenge Measure F, last spring’s ballot planning proposition meant to require referendums on airports, jails and landfills.

They can’t have it both ways. Ballot box planning is either acceptable or not.

It’s actions like these that Orange County residents will remember the next time an El Toro issue is on the ballot, or when the curfew and capacity issue at John Wayne is readdressed before the current limits expire in 2005.

RICHARD PLAVETICH

Laguna Beach

* Where does Derek Quinn get the weird idea that “Ontario wants Orange County air passengers” (Letters, Nov. 11)? The airport manager and those with business interests at Ontario International Airport may want them. The city of Los Angeles, which owns the airport, doesn’t want them. Its mayor has repeatedly urged Orange County officials to assume the county’s “fair share” of the regional air transportation burden.

Several years ago the Orange County Board of Supervisors attempted, unsuccessfully, to promote Ontario as the airport of choice for Orange County residents. I remember going to a meeting where an Ontario citizen stood up to say, “Go home, you Orange County people, solve your air transportation problems in your own backyard!”

The sad part of this whole debate is that we can have at El Toro a civil airport that is compatible with the surrounding community, helps meet growing county needs, and won’t cost the taxpayer one red cent. But you’d never know it from the rhetoric coming from South County anti-airport zealots.

NORM EWERS

Irvine